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To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. To most people the main use of AI is: Code suggestions Code analysi

by mxkopy 3y ago

To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. To most people the main use of AI is: Code suggestions Code analysis Document summarization Document creation Clipart generation Audio transcription Audio synthesis Realistic chat bots ... These are not dubious use cases. The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth. I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.

breakyerself 3y ago
Also AI voice and image recognition and language translation are already ubiquitous.
smoldesu 3y ago
You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria. > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.
- mxkopy 3y ago
  > You're not refuting the point, though. Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such. > Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time. And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto) > What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > No. Crypto provides no utility. That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant. > AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. That's more than just a little facetious. Our AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from. > The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
    - mxkopy 3y ago
      > AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. I will refer you to the Vision Transformer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 I suggest you do a literature review on the applications of ANNs, CNNs and attention mechanisms. They are quite numerous but I will concede that they generally 'just' do compression. AI encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into vectors. Which, their analogous-ness to the real world, is more of a philosophical question than a practical one at this point. > It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. I mean 'human labor' is a very general thing, compared to 'database' IMO. > The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes. This is true but the AI that the military uses is probably a far cry from what the public is able to access - and not from a technological advancement but a specificity standpoint. The military will want deterministic, non-opaque methods that are probably closer to the policy-gradient recommendation systems of old. Think Netflix and TikTok, not GPT. I can say from an investor standpoint AI is probably a bubble but only because its entire foundations are open source. There's no money to be made from it, therefore it's a bubble. Crypto on the other hand always had somewhat dubious foundations. There are few use cases for it, therefore it's a bubble.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
> The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. Not true. I’m seeing fake voice scam stories on the news lately, fake kidnapping claims, etc
- mxkopy 3y ago
  On the contrary, in those cases, AI fulfilled its purpose to the letter. The closest to fraud AI has done is its hallucinatory outputs. And fair enough, this is enough to hold AI back from being 'it'.
  - barbariangrunge 3y ago
    Crypto never scammed anyone. People use crypto to scam people. Hence, my analogy. There is no tech that can scam anybody, except maybe autonomous systems Ai has 1000000x more scam potential than crypto I don’t understand the comparison
    - mxkopy 3y ago
      Well even in this case OpenAI hasn't scammed anyone. On the other hand Binance/FTX scammed a lot of people. I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it. And let's say I was - crypto promises utter anonymity in theory but is actually traceable in practice. So a bit of an academic scam on that front.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it. So... you mean to insinuate the Sam Altman's current "AI Will Kill Us All Tour" isn't a hype bubble? > crypto promises utter anonymity Where? Cryptocurrency promises a separate ledger for transactions where you don't need to be identified by name. If you identify yourself to buy crypto, then yes, you have defeated the purpose. Cryptocurrency doesn't "promise" anonymity any more than encryption "promises" security, though. If that's academic fraud then I'm Abe Lincoln.
      - 3y ago
latexr 3y ago
> Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Being 90% wrong causes a lot of extra work, severely reducing the gains of that 10%.
constantcrying 3y ago
>To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. Not only is it a bad use case, it is self destructive. The only value a currency might have is if it is used in trade, holding currency "because the value goes up" is making it less useful as a currency. Also BTC is very insufficient as an actual currency, especially from a purely technical standpoint.
wesapien 3y ago
If you count manipulation through mass media, social media and speech then AI is already doing harm.

by mxkopy 3y ago

breakyerself 3y ago

Also AI voice and image recognition and language translation are already ubiquitous.

smoldesu 3y ago

You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria. > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.

mxkopy 3y ago
> You're not refuting the point, though. Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such. > Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time. And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto) > What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > No. Crypto provides no utility. That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant. > AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. That's more than just a little facetious. Our AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from. > The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    > AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. I will refer you to the Vision Transformer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 I suggest you do a literature review on the applications of ANNs, CNNs and attention mechanisms. They are quite numerous but I will concede that they generally 'just' do compression. AI encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into vectors. Which, their analogous-ness to the real world, is more of a philosophical question than a practical one at this point. > It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. I mean 'human labor' is a very general thing, compared to 'database' IMO. > The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes. This is true but the AI that the military uses is probably a far cry from what the public is able to access - and not from a technological advancement but a specificity standpoint. The military will want deterministic, non-opaque methods that are probably closer to the policy-gradient recommendation systems of old. Think Netflix and TikTok, not GPT. I can say from an investor standpoint AI is probably a bubble but only because its entire foundations are open source. There's no money to be made from it, therefore it's a bubble. Crypto on the other hand always had somewhat dubious foundations. There are few use cases for it, therefore it's a bubble.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

> The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. Not true. I’m seeing fake voice scam stories on the news lately, fake kidnapping claims, etc

mxkopy 3y ago
On the contrary, in those cases, AI fulfilled its purpose to the letter. The closest to fraud AI has done is its hallucinatory outputs. And fair enough, this is enough to hold AI back from being 'it'.
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Crypto never scammed anyone. People use crypto to scam people. Hence, my analogy. There is no tech that can scam anybody, except maybe autonomous systems Ai has 1000000x more scam potential than crypto I don’t understand the comparison
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    Well even in this case OpenAI hasn't scammed anyone. On the other hand Binance/FTX scammed a lot of people. I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it. And let's say I was - crypto promises utter anonymity in theory but is actually traceable in practice. So a bit of an academic scam on that front.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it. So... you mean to insinuate the Sam Altman's current "AI Will Kill Us All Tour" isn't a hype bubble? > crypto promises utter anonymity Where? Cryptocurrency promises a separate ledger for transactions where you don't need to be identified by name. If you identify yourself to buy crypto, then yes, you have defeated the purpose. Cryptocurrency doesn't "promise" anonymity any more than encryption "promises" security, though. If that's academic fraud then I'm Abe Lincoln.
    - 3y ago

latexr 3y ago

> Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Being 90% wrong causes a lot of extra work, severely reducing the gains of that 10%.

constantcrying 3y ago

>To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. Not only is it a bad use case, it is self destructive. The only value a currency might have is if it is used in trade, holding currency "because the value goes up" is making it less useful as a currency. Also BTC is very insufficient as an actual currency, especially from a purely technical standpoint.

wesapien 3y ago

If you count manipulation through mass media, social media and speech then AI is already doing harm.